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Monday, September 3, 2012

Online Tools Take Time - But Reward too

Ruth and Stacey at Two Writing Teachers host the slice of life community each Tuesday. Come join us!

Some things at school have changed so much since my return to
teaching (a long while ago). I remember
when we first were able to get online that I told students that they must spend
time using the Internet for their research.
Now I would say they should find a certain number of print sources. The learning curve for teachers, in addition
to all the other tasks, is huge.

Most of this
new learning has happened because of the Internet and the possibilities of
reaching a much wider world more easily.
I don’t think I need to reiterate the many ways that teachers can
support students in the new kinds of communication of whatever they want to
say. Sometimes when I search I find it
overwhelming. Is this the best one? How does this work? Does it require e-mails? Is there enough choice in creating?

I’ve
just begun an online tool class and thought I’d share the first thing we do. I have set up an educator license on Diigo,
an online bookmarking site. It’s easy to
do, and all it takes is to find the site and apply. It’s free.
When you receive the license, and when you have your class list, you can
easily set up accounts for all the students.
Diigo will create user names
and passwords for you.

Here’s
the beauty of the Diigo site:

o
It can be accessed anywhere on any
computer that is online.

o
The class can send appropriate
sites to each other, for an individual’s research.

o
When sending a site for the class,
or for an individual, to see, you can send a message with it, put a sticky note
on it, or even highlight and send just part of it.

o
As a teacher, you can send a site
for an assignment. For instance, last
year I sent several different pieces from different points of view about the
celebration of Thanksgiving for everyone to read and comment on. I wanted to do something appropriate for the
season, but also wanted to give students the experience so they could see how
useful it is to be able to send something for response to someone. (If it’s
personal writing, you can do this with Google
Docs.)

o
Diigo saves the entire web page of
the site, even when you only highlight part of it, in case you change your mind
and want to return to the whole article.

o
Diigo sends the ‘owner’, meaning
you the teacher, daily e-mails of more online tools and helpful internet
sources.

o
Diigo lets you make numerous tags
for each bookmark, and even aids that by giving suggestions you can just click
to choose.

I started the class with this site, and students were up and
starting very soon, looking for good pages to begin their individual unit
research that occurs at my school. I
have lots of plans to show them other online tools, and I will be able to do
that easily by using Diigo. I can send
to the class or to the individuals according to their needs and goals. I also expect them to share ideas to the
class too. Finally, when someone is absent,
they can still participate at home.

Sounds like Diigo is working for you--I tried Delicious back in the day but my school district wouldn't block it because they called it social networking. You've inspired me; I'll try again. I also like the layout of Symbaloo, but they don't have the student accounts. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks to all who commented, & shared their concerns of the site being blocked. I hope that the school districts don't block this valuable site. Unfortunately it is called 'Social bookmarking' but that's only because one can share with others if one chooses, but not in the education groups. The site I set up is monitored by me, so I see all the bookmarks and comments that my group members send. I hope that information is helpful.

I think you said it best in your title - there are many great tech tools, but we just need to take the time and create the space to try it out, play around, and learn how it can enhance our teaching and learning. Thanks for sharing!

I've heard a lot about Diigo, but I haven't tried it yet. Will explore this more. I usually share web tools such as these to my teacher-students, and I have a feeling that this one would prove to be particularly useful to them too. Thanks for sharing your experiences with us, Linda. And I hope that things are fine now at home. :)